Films of High Adventure, Volume I Can’t Be Bothered To Check Right Now: The Abominable Dr. Phibes

My friend Molly Tanzer and I both like watching cheesy fantasy movies, and we both like talking trash about the same, and so we're posting about our viewings of older “classics.” These columns will run every Wednesday on our blogs, excluding the last post of each month, which will appear on the Fantasy magazine website. These were important childhood movies for at least one of us and so we'll be examining them with the oh-so-academic now-and-then approach, and, where possible, we will be cussing like sailors to show off how mature we are now. Feel free to offer suggestions/rebuttals/your own reminisces/cusses at either of our blogs.

Film: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Also Known As: No joke, the first two times I started writing the title I wrote The Awesome Dr. Phibes, and then, catching myself, started typing The Amazing Dr. Phibes instead. Ok, so not technically alternate titles, but a telling sign nonetheless. . .

WHOSE RESPONSIBLE THIS??? Direction by Robert Fuest, who also helmed The Last Man on Earth (I Am Legend with Vincent Price in the lead!), The Devil’s Rain (the Milk and Cheese favorite starring Ernest Borgnine!), and a bunch of episodes of The Avengers (if you’re not familiar with John Steed and Mrs. Emma Peel it’s high time you made their acquaintance). Script by James Whiton (uh, an episode of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.) and William Goldstein (screen story credit for The Amazing Dobermans, a movie featuring Fred Astaire fighting crime with a pack of pinschers), although Fuest apparently rewrote most of it. On one side of the ring of absurdity we have Vincent Price (everything that is good in this world) as Dr. Phibes and Bond-girl (On her Majesty’s Secret Service) Virginia North as his assistant Vulnavia (!), and on the other we have Joseph Cotton (The Third Man), Hugh Griffith (Tom Jones, the whacked out Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mama’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feeling So Sad), Peter Jeffrey (Count Grendel in some old Dr. Who episodes), and a host of other actors looking to chew some scenery and get done in by the good Dr. Phibes. Bizzaro soundtrack by various artists, including lots of organ music and Vincent singing “Over the Rainbow.”

Quote: “Nine killed you! Nine shall die! Nine eternities in DOOM!”

Alternate quote: “A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon. Words fail me, gentlemen.”

First viewing by Molly: Pretty recently

First viewing by Jesse: Really young

Most recent viewing by both: The aforementioned “pretty recently”

Impact on Molly’s childhood development: Well, none, given that I’d never even heard of this weird little movie, but given that my early adolescence was largely me thinking The Phantom of the Opera was like, the single most amazingly romantic book evarrrrrrrr and why didn’t Christine go for the Phantom when he was clearly so much more interesting than that milquetoast nothing-master Raoul, I feel like I was a pump well-primed for this omgwtfbbq-fest, especially the bizarre Phibes/Vulnavia relationship.

Impact on Jesse’s childhood development: High. Of all the old horror movie icons, Price was my favorite, and of all his roles, this was perhaps the most important to Young Me.

Random youtube clip that hasn’t been taken down for copyright infringement:

Molly’s thoughts prior to re-watching: “WTF is this?”

Jesse’s thoughts prior to re-watching: Excited. Price undeniably made some stinkers in his time, but I was confident that this film had aged like a fine Roquefort. I had no idea if Molly would love it or hate it, and, frankly, didn’t give a damn—nothing could possibly diminish the experience, though I of course hoped she would dig it. . . contrary to what this column might occasionally imply, I don’t actually enjoy punishing Molly with cinema.

Molly’s thoughts post-viewing: Awesome. I really, really liked it, even though now, as an adult, I often find things that have a sort of Phantom of the Opera-ish sensibility about them to be pretty tiresome—obsession is really only sexy on the page or on the screen, a lesson I hope the legions of Twilight fans realize before they end up in problematic relationships with dudes who like to creep into the bedrooms of girls that smell real good and only have two emotional modes—constipated disapproval or condescending amusement.

N-E-WAYZ, I had my doubts during the opening sequence that has Dr. Phibes in a hooded robe playing an organ, but as the movie progressed into unapologetic insanity, I warmed to it, and then thoroughly enjoyed it. At the center of my affection was the Phibes-Vulnavia relationship, which is just so outright bizarre that it works perfectly without explanation. Wikipedia says that originally it was to be revealed that Vulnavia was one of Dr. Phibes’ clockwork creations, but I call bullshit on that, and I’m glad they left it undefined. For me, it’s a much more amazing scenario if Vulnavia is. . . just. . . some girl he met somehow? Who was totally OK hunting down and murdering doctors and nurses as long as Dr. Phibes kept her in furry hats and let her pose like a Mucha girl while he put on his gold lame cape and played music. Sure! Why not?

Good times.

Jesse’s thoughts post-viewing: Such exquisite film-making! Fitting tidily into the “Vincent Price whacks a bunch of people according to a theme” sub-genre of the great man’s career, I say, with only slight reservation, that this is the best of the bunch. Theatre of Blood makes it a tough call, as the murders in that film are all based on scenes from Shakespeare instead of biblical plagues, and it features a fencing match on trampolines, but Phibes still comes out ahead if no other reason than I saw it first and that has to count for something.

I suppose the main thing I had forgotten over the years was how bugfuck the movie really is—virtually no effort is put into explaining how Phibes manages to pull off his outlandish murders, let alone build a clockwork band and, maybe, girlfriend…he’s a doctor, sure, but a doctor of divinity and musicology (for serious). I suppose if they had started worrying about logic and realism they would have had to scrap the scene where fruitbats suck a guy’s blood, or the part with the locusts that…well, it really has to be seen to be believed, but the point is if reality intruded then all the fun would be gone and you’d be left with, I dunno, Se7en.

The thing is, other than the poster and spoiler-heavy trailer, the movie seems to play it fairly straight-faced. Maybe? As a kid I certainly took it very seriously, yet rooted unreservedly for Phibes—he did what he did for love, after all, and is that so wrong? As an eight year old I had a hard time holding him accountable for his nefarious deeds, and as a twenty-eight year old I still refuse to pass judgment on the doctor.

It’s a bizarre, campy picture even by Price standards, and the script gives him ample room to do what he does best, even if he is talking out of his neck. It’s impossible not to root for Phibes, if only to see what insanely complicated murder he will pull off next, and I still get choked up thinking about what happens to poor Vulnavia. To say they don’t make them like this anymore is a bit of an understatement—gone are the days when studios would be like “this makes absolutely no sense, and doesn’t seem to be a comedy but definitely isn’t a horror film, either, and will use up a decent sized budget…but what the hell, go nuts—have your proto-slasher lead cover Judy Garland while you’re at it.” Alas.

High Points: Vincent Price doing what he does best. How straight everyone is playing it. The unsettling—and unaddressed—relationship between Phibes and Vulnavia. Vulnavia herself, and apparently we’re not the only ones to realize this—somebody out there on the internet not only recognized her importance, but also the importance of mistakenly attributing the Flashdance theme to Hall and Oats:

Final Verdict: Excellent.

Next Time: Batman

[Cross-posted to Molly's website]

• Leave a Comment
• Cross-posted to LiveJournal

Films of High Adventure, and Stuff

• Leave a Comment
• Cross-posted to LiveJournal

A Dispatch from the Fens

The approach to the Dordrecht Biesbosch does not really set the tone for the park itself so much as subvert it; rather than the jaysus, that’s beautiful and only getting better sensation one experiences when approaching many natural wonders the drive to the Biesbosch imparts one with a deep and uncomfortable how the fuck could, no, how the fuck can we be doing this to our air, our water our soil—tangles of industrial buildings like some too-obvious mirror of the undergrowth squeezing in where it can between road and bikepath and chainlink fence, smokestacks more numerous than an eckeltje’s spines erupting great plumes of exhaust that blend with the clouds and are swallowed by them, camouflaged and invisible almost immediately, a faint briny, chemical stench wafting over the place that brings to mind nothing so much as the impossible aroma of a sea vomiting. What could be a dike to the left is a toxic landfill, what looks at first like a polder through the trees on the right is a golf course. Still, we must not despair, for beauty often lies in contrast, and just as the pristine beaches of Cape San Blas lie across a bay from a papermill now thankfully gone still, the Dupont Miracles of Science! billboards plastered over that depressing jumble of warehouses and machinery serve as a grotesque sentinel guarding the entrance of that verdant labyrinth of willows and reeds and rivers and creeks—the Biesboch, the Forest of Rushes.

It was growing dark as I rode back from dinner but rather than turning into the hostel I shot passed, the circle of my headlight bobbing faintly across the fietspath in front of me as I peddled on to the park proper, the trail leading past the small Biesbosch center and boathouse and into the network of trails. This is the exact route that made me fall in love with the place, the darkening forest holding you for only a moment before the world opens up into the marshy pasture, the reclaimed polder edged by the dike curving in front and the willows far on the other side of the fields. We are wrong when we think of dikes, usually—this example is far more typical, a small grassy ridge crowned with trees and a footpath with a small channel on the other side. The night before I walked that rampart, the cropped willows with their shadow faces and the countless noises of the midnight marsh far more eerie than the wind rustling across the polder and through the silver willows of the gloaming. Massive hares the size of foxes dart out and away, a single standing black ewe eyes me from a clump of prone white sheep, owls bob and sway through the air in front of me, one fine, almost-white specimen scouting the terrain before me, dipping back and forth across the bikepath, her flight almost drunken, and then she wheels up and away as I enter another small patch of wood, the shadows deeper, my light brighter, the sky when I emerge somehow thicker, greyer, even more distant than should be possible. The willows are waiting.

This is all land reclaimed many times over, the village that might once have stood in this little polder so hard won from the sea gobbled up by floodwaters six hundred years ago—laying the foundation for a new swimming pool they found a calf preserved in the silt, and fishermen who troll the creeks and canals still draw up ancient bones, ancient teeth. When the flood made a freshwater sea of the place the Dutch wasted no time in wrestling back the waters—they looked for rushes in that great tidal lake, and when they found them they planted reeds, and when the reeds strengthened their mudbanks they planted willows, and when the willows grew they had islands, and in these islands they dug trenches, osier-beds, and harvested the willows, and harvested the reeds, and even harvested the rushes, the biezen. The willows were allowed to grow to waist height, sometimes shoulder, and then were hacked across, and the shoots that burst from these living stumps were harvested—every year where thinner boughs were needed, every three for the broader shoots. The willow cutters had lives as hard as their hooked blades, as did the reed cutters, as did the rush gatherers, and for centuries they alone knew how to navigate the maze of islands and streams—when war came the resistance hid there, and ran messages across enemy lines, but before and after the only ones other than the men who worked the Forest of Rushes were the poachers and the beasts they hunted to extinction—the last beaver fell in the early 1800s, and only in recent years have imported German acquisitions ushered in a bestial renaissance in this green and silver and brown mess of beauty incarnate.

The willows lining the path are not the broad mourners we think of—they are those I spoke of before, broad trunked fellows that suddenly explode in a riot of thin shoots, hundreds, thousands of them, their leaves the color of swords in the predawn mist but nowhere near so hard, their color bleeding out into the sky and down into the ground, and back I go. Rather than following the same path home along the dike I cut across the field on a trail tramped in the wet grass, the bike devolving into a boneshaker of old as I ride it across the polder, the willows ever constant on my left, geese shrieking in the dark, and home is always too close through the trees. The light is gone but I would not say it has failed, no I would not. 

• Leave a Comment
• Cross-posted to LiveJournal